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a considered opinion: washed out - life of leisure
Oh, if only this EP had come out at the beginning of the summer, rather than during its dying gasps. It certainly would have been a welcome addition to a season that witnessed the never-ending onslaught of The Black Eyed Peas. I hear they reinvented the album, or something. Under the Washed Out moniker, South Carolina’s Ernest Greene crafts dense, hazy electropop that evokes muggy summer nights in the same way that Kyuss evokes the arid climes of the southwest. Greene avoids sounding like cliché summer beach music, however, by drenching his analogue synths with layers of reverb and fuzzed-out bass lines. This is not music you listen to while lounging on a deck chair, but rather while driving home after the sun has gone down.
While most of the songs on Life of Leisure coast along on a similar laid back groove, “Hold Out” is the one exception that could pass for club-ready dance music, and also features what is possibly Greene’s strongest vocal performance, stacking tight vocal harmonies underneath the pounding bass and cascading keyboards. Greene’s vocals throughout manage to sound hazy and distant, but without the sense of detachment that plagues many of his peers. Although his vocal performances do sound rather similar from one song to the next, it comes across not so much as a lack of imagination than as a conscious decision to not fix what isn’t broken.
The overall tone and mood of the songs remain consistent throughout the EP, and would have made for a thoroughly coherent and well-sequenced piece, if not for one glaring fault. A few of the tracks here end far too abruptly, sounding as through Greene simply chopped off the last few seconds of each song. A jarring enough sensation in and of itself, it sticks out like a sore thumb in a collection of songs that would have benefited hugely from sequencing that melted one track into the next. To be fair, Greene did record the entirety of Life of Leisure in a bedroom in his parents’ house, so the odd blemish is to be expected, and doesn’t prevent it from being the blissed-out gem that it is.
Some American RECOMMENDS Washed Out’s Life of Leisure EP
Life of Leisure is available as a digital download now and on 12” vinyl (only 1000 pressed) from early October at Mexican Summer
